2016 is a special year for many FLOSS projects: KDE has its 20th birthday while Free Software Foundation Europe and VideoLAN both have their 15th birthday. All these call for celebrations!

This year KDE, Qt, FSFE, VideoLAN and KDAB have come together to bring you QtCon, where attendees can meet, collaborate and get the latest news of all these projects at the bcc in Berlin from the 1st to the 4th of September 2016.

QtCon is open to all with a passion for Qt, open source and free software - not just members.

In case of changes in the schedule, you can also update the schedule to have an up-to-date view of what is happening where. The app has maps showing where talks are and the possibility to mark sessions of interest, so you can plan your own event.

QtCon is an event that brings together five different communities under one roof. To give everyone a bit of a feeling of the background of those communities, what is going to happen and who is participating in the BCC this weekend, we conducted an interview with the organizer of each community.

First we start with, Lydia Pintscher, who is the president of KDE since 2014 and has been in the board of directors since 2011.

What have been the biggest improvements in the last 5 years?
The KDE community has made great strides over the past 5 years. Plasma, one of our main products has been completely overhauled in the past 5 years. Countless of our applications have gotten new features and other improvements. We have also taken in new projects that were previously outside our core competencies and incubated them. Most notably WikiToLearn - an educational platform that aims to produce free collaborative text books. I am also proud of important projects like GCompris and Kdenlive joining our community. They help us provide
a truly open alternative for our users. In the long run I believe two other steps though will have the biggest impact: The creation of our vision and our move to collaborate with
other organisations more closely. Any community needs a vision to rally around. Our initial vision set out by Matthias Ettrich 20 years ago has served us well for a long time but over the past years it became more and more obvious that we've lost our guiding light in the work we do. So we set out to change that. The first step was formulating our vision. The result of the process is a renewed vision the KDE community stands behind: "A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy." We can not realize this vision on our own. We then set out to take steps to collaborate more closely with other organizations in our ecosystem in order to increase the impact of our work for our users. Organizing QtCon with many other partners is just one of them. Stay tuned for an exciting announcement in the next days.

What is special about KDE and its community?
KDE is special for many reasons but to me three stand out most prominently:
* KDE is an amazing community that understands that it matters how we treat each other and that values each other. People come to us for the code but stay for the community.
* KDE is a place where people can truly learn and grow. We give people opportunities that they don't get elsewhere and help them achieve what they set out to do. Our extensive mentoring programs are just one part of that.
* We have technically excellent and pragmatic people who want to provide great free software for you.

What do we expect from this year's Akademy
I have already heard about a few exciting things that I unfortunately can't share yet without spoiling all the fun for you One thing is for sure: We will get together a large number of really bright and dedicated people. Having KDE, VideoLAN, FSFE, The Qt Project and KDAB organize a joined conference will be a unique opportunity to get people to talk about issues that we all face together like the loss of agency of people over their digital life and the consequences this has for Free Software. Oh and of course we have a lot to celebrate with KDE's 20th and VideoLAN's and FSFE's 15th anniversary. Sustaining software projects and communities for so long is a huge achievement.

What do you think KDE and all the other organizing communities have in common in creating this event?
We share a common love for Free Software and enabling people with great software.

Describe the conference in 3 words? collaboration, celebration, community

Next up is Tero Kojo, the Qt community manager.

How do you think the gathering of four communities can create an impact as a whole?
Meeting people from other communities is important, as it creates a place to share ideas and find out what others are working on and doing.

What is special about Qt and its communities?
The Qt community strives to be a friendly and welcoming place. The most impressive thing in my view is that the community members go out of their way to help others with any problems they may run into. No matter how complicated or simple the issue is, someone always steps up to help.

How does Qt feel having all these four communities join in to make this
conference all together?
It feels great! We have on several years been chatting with KDE about doing something together, but getting four different communities to participate and gather in one location is absolutely fantastic. I've been going through the event schedule, and I really hope I get some time off from handling practicalities to listen to some of the sessions. I can't believe how many different and interesting topics there are!

What is in store for Qt after this big conference?
Lots of things coming in the autumn. The biggest one being the Qt World Summit in San Francisco in October. That is the main Qt event of the year! Also developers are hard at work for the next release of Qt, 5.8.

Describe the conference in 3 words?
Meeting place of great communities!

Then we have Frances Tait, who is the event organizer for KDAB and has over 15 years of experience as a scenario based strategy consultant and facilitator.

Do you think this conference will contribute to KDAB?
Our CEO, Kalle Dalheimer was one of the original founders of KDE and KDAB has long been a contributor and supporter of the Qt community, so we have strong links right from the start. KDABians attending QtCon will benefit from the cross-community exchange of knowledge and ideas which can only nourish the core excellence that KDAB is known for. They also count on having fun, which is always good.

What is special about KDAB and its community?
KDAB first and foremost is a learning community and that’s why people like being with us. One of our company principles is that our engineers can work from wherever they want to, and with flexible working hours which gives great freedom. Nonetheless many choose to base themselves around one of our offices, which we have in Germany, France, UK, Sweden and the US so they get social contact as well. We make a point of meeting up, all of us, at least once a year and at other times in team meetings and events, so that everybody feels part of the KDAB family. Our internal communications and ways of working together mean that support is always there when needed and someone is usually able to help solve that tricky problem a client suddenly comes up with when you’re out in the field. We also like cake.. and ice cream. And did I mention the beer?

As an event specialist, what do you think is attractive for attendees in joining this conference?
There’s an enormous range of top talks, unprecedented, really, across commercial, open source and free software. A great opportunity to meet new people and learn new things in a superb venue with great food.

Describe the conference in 3 words?
Awesome, inspiring, enriching.

Felix Paul Kühne is one of VLC’s Lead Developers and their organization is celebrating their 15th year during the conference.

What is in store for VLC after celebrating their 15th year?
In fact, VideoLAN and VLC are a lot older than 15 years, dating back to a student project initiating in 1995. VLC and VideoLAN became fully open source under GPLv2 on Feb 1 2001 thanks to a special permission from the dead of École Centrale Paris. Despite diversification of devices and operating systems, we want to continue to live up to our mission statement “plays everything, everywhere” with recent additions of VLC for Xbox and Apple TV to VLC’s growing cone family. As many “grown-up” open-source projects developed by students and young professionals, we will see a generational shift with new talent moving VideoLAN’s projects to unknown endeavors, potentially leading to an entire VLC ecosystem. Historically, VideoLAN is a home for multimedia enthusiasts to experiment, which we are constantly fostering to keep the dynamics and excitement.

As an organizer of this conference, what are your thoughts on VLC collaborating with other software communities?
VideoLAN is an umbrella for a large number of open source projects and communities. VLC’s unmatched feature set and popularity would not have been possible without thorough integration and interaction with a large number of other software communities. To date, VLC’s depends up to 130 directly used packages contributed by uncountable numbers of volunteers. On the other hand, VLC’s code base serves as the base for an equally large number of communities depending on us. One of the major goals of the VideoLAN non-profit organization is to support both ends of the spectrum through collaboration, stable development processes, common sprints and more.

Describe the QtCon in 3 words?
Qt Con Playground

What is special about VLC and its community?
VLC’s the most popular French software worldwide and the only major open source project without large scale commercial support. All our fiscal needs are met through voluntary donations from our users, we don’t have any employees and no business model.

and finally we have, Erik Albers, the community builder of the FSFE.

What do you think is FSFE's major impact?
We are changing the perception that software is just technology by highlighting the social, political, and economic aspect of software. Together with other organisations we help more people to understand how Free Software contributes to freedom, transparency, and self-determination. We enhance users' rights by abolishing barriers to Free Software adoption. For those areas we provide resources to enable everyone to further promote Free Software in Europe.

What is special about FSFE and its community?
The FSFE is a pan-European organisation and our community is driven by the wish to empower users to control technology. We have different cultural and political backgrounds, but we are united in the idea to fight for users and software freedom - at the local levels, as well as on the European level. This common ground comes with a very friendly and welcoming attitude.

Describe the conference in 3 words?
Business, community, politics.

The FSFE is celebrating 15 years of existence during the conference, what are the popular highlights that you are commemorating?
Oh this list is too long to be reproduced here. But, during my time with the FSFE for sure our Free Your Android campaign was a remarkable public activity to let people realise how important their mobile computers are and how they can regain control over such devices. Lots of Free Software supporters worked with us to get rid of proprietary software advertisement from over 1000 websites of the public administration. In general, we get better in campaigning with every year we do and I remember impressive and community-driven Ask-Your-Candidates campaigns as well as the European Free-Software-Pactthat we ran in collaboration with other political Free Software organisations. Our I love Free Software Day has in the meantime grown into a prominent annual day inside the Free Software community to say thank you to all of us and our commitments.

What is after the conference, for the FSFE?
We will relax a bit so we have enough energy to continue with our long-term work. For example balancing the radio lockdown directive or talking with EU institutions and governments about the dangers of FRAND for Free Software. Beside that we hope to get enough donations so we can intensify our work to make sure that publicly financed software is released under Free Software licenses.

It is said that the last ones shall be the first and so is our closing keynote speaker the first one to introduce: QtCon is happy to welcome Julia Reda, Member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party and Vice-Chair of the Greens/European Free Alliance. Reda's legislative focus is on copyright and internet policy issues.

As a member of the European Parliament and together with Max Andersson, Julia Reda initiated the pilot project “Governance and quality of software code – Auditing of free and open source software” in 2014 as a reaction to the so-called “heartbleed” bug in OpenSSL. The idea turned into the pilot-project „Free and Open Source Software Auditing“ (FOSSA) that is aiming at improving the security of those Free Software programs that are in use by the European Commission and the Parliament.

QtCon is the event that brings together five different communities in one place to share and collaborate. In the same spirit, we are happy to announce the possibility for other projects or organisations, to present themselves during QtCon in a so called "poster session". We are looking for personal, smaller and/or non-commercial projects that are Free Software or related and in the spirit of openness and freedom.

On Friday evening, September 2nd, beginning around dinner time, we offer and set up a dedicated space close to the dining area, where chosen projects are invited to present themselves or a contemporary project. This is your chance to reach out for new audiences, contributors or donors. Unfortunately, due to space limitations, we can only offer this opportunity for up to ten different "posters". If you like to be one of them, please apply by writing to team@qtcon.org and use the tag [poster].

Please be aware that space is limited: Each presenter will just have space to hang up one poster/banner or to put one roll-up with a maximum size of A0 paper size (841 × 1189 mm, upright). Additionally, there will be one standing table in front of each poster, that can be used to put some leaflets or other printouts. Each poster/project is only allowed to be presented by one person.

Online communities such as FLOSS create freely available products in a social process. At this year’s QtCon, Mirko Boehm will review the governance norms applied in FSFE and KDE, and how these have developed over time.

Communities with a small number of participants typically organise informally. As the community grows, the need for coordination grows as well and at some point formal organisation is required. Where structure and processes emerge, the principles and norms applied typically reflect voluntary participation and meritocratic peer status. The main interest of the community is to attract and retain contributors and to collect contributions.

The presentation will review the governance norms applied by the KDE Community and FSFE as the organisations developed, how the constitutions of the communities reflect the convictions and expectations of their contributors, and how current debates reflect their evolution, and how the need to evolve governance norms is at the heart of recent conflicts in both communities

On the 3rd of September 2016, Mirko Boehm, CEO, Endocode, will present his topic “The emergence of governance norms in FLOSS communities” at the bcc in Berlin.

Mirko Boehm is a Free Software and Open Source advocate, primarily as a speaker and author. He has been a contributor to the KDE Desktop since 1997, including several years on the KDE e.V. Board. He is a visiting lecturer and researcher on Free Software and Open Source at the Technical University of Berlin, a fellowship representative in the FSFE GA and a Qt-certified specialist and trainer. Mirko Boehm has a wide range of experience as an entrepreneur, a corporate manager, a software developer and a German Air Force officer.

Qt applications for desktop and mobile are truly “code once, deploy everywhere” as MuseScore, an innovative startup from Germany has proven. The MuseScore desktop software and the MuseScore mobile application are a perfect example of cross-platform, multi-screen deployment with a single source code.

On the 3rd of September 2016, Nicolas Froment from MuseScore will present his topic “Continuous tests and distribution for Qt applications on desktop and mobile” at the bcc in Berlin.

MuseScore is a company with that offers an application for writing musical notation. On the desktop they offer a traditional Qt application that runs across different desktop platforms. Their strategy for ”going mobile” was not to take that same application as-is to mobile but to extend their offering by providing the MuseScore Player, a player for the notes, on mobile platforms. They were able to re-use the same technology, Qt, to go mobile. Available across all platforms (Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android, iOS), MuseScore is a free and open source cross platform software hosted on github.com. This Qt Widget application uses the CMake build system and regressions tests written with QTest and managed by CTest.

At QtCon 2016, visitors will learn how the MuseScore project uses Travis-CI to build and run the tests for every push but also every pull requests made to the project. During the presentation, you will also learn how Travis-CI is used to deliver self-contained binaries for Linux (AppImage) on x86_64, x86 and ARM on Bintray.com and also a DMG package for MacOS on a public FTP server. For Windows builds, the use of AppVeyor will also be presented. The discussion will introduce the challenges of building automatically a large desktop app in a relatively constrained environment without any UI.

MuseScore also provides a mobile app for iOS and Android. The app is in Qt/QML and built with qmake. We will show how a new version of the app is sent to testers for every build and how the app is cross compiled, automatically tested and, deployed on both Google Play and the Apple App Store together with metadata and screenshots translated in several languages. We will discuss the different problems which had to be solved in order to have a fully automated distribution chain.

The MuseScore Songbook app, which was built with Qt, is consistently ranked in the Top 10 of the Music category in the Apple App Store and in the Top 500 for iPad in several markets.

Nicolas summarizes, “we hope that sharing our experience with other Qt developers will help to generalize continuous tests and distributions among the Qt community and then develop best practices to solve common problems. MuseScore is poised for growth and there is great potential for the future.”

Are you attending QtCon? Help make it unforgettable, and get an exclusive QtCon t-shirt into the bargain. Please consider signing up to be a volunteer.

Everybody attending the conference is welcome to be a QtCon Volunteer. It doesn't matter where you are from, your age, your skills, whether you have ever attended a Free Software conference, or have ever been to Berlin before. As long as you can communicate in English, you can contribute as a volunteer.

To help us work out what quantity of each size of t-shirt to order please Sign up by 28th July as later on we may run short of some sizes, but we will do our best.